too… stay safe,” I said.
He tipped his hat as he went back to his car and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Sorry!” I said as I found the hole again. “The police showed up!”
“What!”
“He just wanted to warn me about the bridge having rotten boards.”
“Did you tell him you knew about them?”
“No, because then he would think it was even more unsafe.”
“Good. Now watch for the light.”
Ten minutes later, “This isn’t working. Maybe the man was taller than me. Maybe I should be down there and you should be up here.”
“It’s worth a try. I’m getting hungry. We need to find this thing soon.”
Twiggy waded to the river bank and we met half way and handed off the headlamp. I climbed down to the water again, then slip-slided my way under the bridge. Twiggy took his position above and I looked around for the spot of sky through the hole.
“I see the hole,” I said. “Do you see me?”
He walked around until we were looking at each other through the hole.
“AHhhh! Catfish!” he yelled.
“Where?!” I exclaimed, then promptly jerked around, slipped, and fell waist deep in the river.
“Okay, it’s gone now,” he said.
“Ha, ha, very funny,” I stammered as I attempted to stand. “That helped our search ever so much. The catfish swallowed the flashlight.” I brought the headlamp up out of the water and tried to turn it on. “I don’t think they planned on this being used on scuba dives.”
“Oh shoot. Now what are we going to do?” he asked.
“I guess we will have to rough it and find it on geosenses alone.”
He climbed down and we searched the underside of the bridge again but there were so many dark spaces under the bridge that there were hundreds of places to search and to reach them we had to stand on slippery rocks. I couldn’t reach most of the timbers of the bridge so I gave up and began looking amongst the rocks on the bank. Then I couldn’t help but remember that glint that came through the hole so I searched the top of the bridge and ended up with my arm through the hole in the bridge again. So far every car that had come through had been very slow, so I wasn’t worried about being run over, just making the neighbors think I was crazy. I didn’t mind being a crazy person to somebody I’d never see again. I reached, groped, probed. I found a stick and poked it around. I was just about to give up when the stick hit something metal and I heard a clunk, tink, tunk, tuuummbbble, splash. I yanked the stick out and lay face down trying to see what fell. All I could see was river rocks and water. I was so excited about maybe finally finding the cache that I dashed down to the river bank and saw a cracker tin with a mirror glued to one side lopsidedly floating down the river.
“Get it!” I exclaimed as I slipped over the slick rocks. “It’s getting away!”
The cracker tin seemed to mock us in slow motion as it quietly floated away. Little currents would grab the corner of the mirror and make it turn lazily as we half dashed, half swam down the river. The tin had a head start.
“Slow down you crazy r…” I stepped into a fishing hole and disappeared under the surface. I came up sputtering and attempting to swim.
“Don’t worry,” Twiggy said. “The farmer said there was a log jam ahead. It’ll get stuck there.”
“Why is it floating if it’s metal?” I asked.
“Because it’s full of air?”
“Oh, yeah, hehe. I hope it doesn’t leak.”
We waded to the river bank and followed the river until we reached the log jam. Luckily it was only a small one so we were able to walk out onto a log and survey the river upstream from us. I noticed that the log was very worn, like children played at the river bank, and fished for spooky catfish and trout. Seeing the worn spots on the log made the river seem a friendlier place.
“What?” Twiggy asked.
“Nothing. I was just noticing that people like this river. They come down here a lot. It’s like a member of their family that has been running near their houses for longer than they can remember and I like it. I really like it. Thank you for bringing me here.”
“Even after you got dunked in the creek?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t bring you here. The cache did. Look, there it is.”
We walked the log closer to where the tin was floating. We had to use a long stick to get the tin around a snag, but we eventually plucked it from the creek.
“You open it,” he said. “The first few caches are always more fun to open. Let’s see what’s in it.”
I pried and pulled, but the lid was really tight. I guess that was good. Had it been loose it might have leaked and sunk. Twiggy pried the lid off and handed it to me. I opened the mysterious box and looked inside. It was damp. Moisture clung to the bag the logbook was in, but the log was dry inside its baggie. The rest of the contents were a different story.
“I think we better take this to the river bank where we can spread things out and let them dry.”
We sat on a little grassy spot and dumped out the contents, then sorted and dried them as much as we could. We had to throw away a card and some stickers that were too wet and worn out to be any good. I found a little purple bendy rabbit, a squished penny, a kid’s meal toy of a colorful parrot, and a bottle opener. There was also an odd tag attached to a jointed metal moose.
“What’s this?” I asked as I held it up for Twiggy’s inspection.
“Oh cool! That’s a Travel Bug… or one of its cousins. Let me see.” I handed him the tag. “We’re going on the road so we should take it.”
“Why?”
“Because it wants to travel.”
“How do you know? Did you ask it?”
“We can ask it when we get online again. If it wants to stay in the area we can always drop it off locally.”
“You make it sound like the Travel Bug has an opinion about this,” I pointed out.
“It does! Though we need to read the site and see what it wants to do. If it is trying to go east we should drop it off in another cache. But if it wants to go west we should take it and log it at the caches we find.”
I was deciding I knew absolutely nothing about geocaching when he said, “Good find!” That kind of made up for my confusion about what a Travel Bug might be. How could a bug be a moose?
“Do I get to trade?” I asked.
“Sure,
